


Morphic

by Dragonfree (antialiasis)



Category: Pokemon
Genre: Gen, Pokemorphs, Science Fiction
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2009-11-21
Updated: 2009-11-21
Packaged: 2017-10-03 12:10:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/antialiasis/pseuds/Dragonfree
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A team of scientists who have had a little too much to drink get the not-so-great idea of attempting to genetically engineer Pokémon/human hybrids. They were not prepared for the consequences.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Morphic

**Author's Note:**

> This fic contains lots and lots of political references. First, they are not there to offend anyone. Second, they are not there to preach my opinions, either. The characters have their views, with no correlation to my own views or my opinion of actual people who hold similar views. There is no moral or message here; there's just characters acting in accordance with their individual personalities. So please do not try to infer anything about my views from what happens in this story (odds are you would be wrong if you attempted it, anyway) and try not to take any of it personally.
> 
> There is also a lot of swearing. You have been warned.

_Calm down now. Be cool._

Brian straightened his tie nervously in front of a large mirror. He ran his eyes yet again quickly up and down his reflection. His posture looked far too timid for such an important appearance. He took a deep breath and tried to straighten himself, pushed the glasses a little further up on his nose and silently cursed himself for having shown up with them – they were too big and looked too dorky. Too stereotypical. He wished he’d gotten used to contacts sometime.

“Mr. Edwards, five minutes.”

He nodded, seeing in the mirror as a short member of the TV crew stepped out of the room. He was alone now.

“Damn it,” he swore under his breath, briefly taking his glasses off just to see how he looked. He depressingly assured himself that the blurry flesh-colored blob he could see in front of him definitely looked much better now than with the glasses on. Damn it all. Tomorrow he’d get himself some contacts and use them, no matter what. Who knew when he’d next have to appear on TV?

_Dave should have gone,_ he thought frantically to himself. _I’m terrible with words. I’m sure he could convince that audience that black is white if he wanted. Why couldn’t he have done it?_

But that was a rhetorical question. Dave and his girlfriend were by now at some fancy restaurant celebrating their anniversary. He had been practically begged to go; Dave had given him a long speech about what his relationship meant to him. And in some moment of pity, or just submissiveness, he had agreed to it, figuring it would perhaps, maybe, if he looked optimistically at it, not be _quite_ as bad as it sounded. But, damn it, it was even worse.

“Mr. Edwards?”

“Yes, uh, I’m coming.”

He took one last look at himself in the mirror – there were so many things that were still wrong! – before he dragged himself through the door. A member of the TV crew ushered him into a chair. He felt his palms sweating at the sight of all the cameras; he quickly turned to his opponent in the chair opposite him. It was a well-built woman with long, black hair who would have been attractive if only her thick-rimmed purple glasses had been a little less extravagant and her thin lips weren’t sealed in an unflattering pout. She looked at him out of the corner of her eyes with an expression of deep resentment etched into her face. He shifted in his chair; she was no more comfortable to look at than the cameras.

He desperately looked around for anything else to focus his attention on. With relief, he saw the host, a casual, stylishly-dressed man, come hurrying over to sit in a third chair and put up a shamelessly fake television smile.

“Good evening, and welcome to Friday Night with James Sullivan!” he said suddenly, indicating that they were on air. “Tonight we are looking at what promises to be an insightful discussion about the recent controversy surrounding a team of bioscientists who seem to have achieved the engineering of ‘Pokémorphs’, living fetuses with hybrid human and Pokémon DNA. Now, despite the violent opposition of various groups and individuals to the very creation of such hybrids, tonight we have another take on the matter, concerning research team head and spokesman David Ambrose’s statement this Wednesday that the fetuses are to be destroyed after a few weeks of development. Please welcome Brian Edwards, geneticist for Heywood Labs, and Hannah Mariani, chairwoman of Women Against Abortion and creator of a petition opposing the termination of the fetuses.”

The woman nodded curtly at the camera. Brian quickly realized he wasn’t supposed to be staring wildly at James and jerked his head towards it as well, giving it a nervous smile.

“So, Brian, why don’t you start? Why do you want to kill the ‘Pokémorphs’?”

“Me?” slipped out of him before he could stop himself. “Oh, well… you see…” He tried desperately to remember what he had been planning to say, flicking his gaze towards his perfectly calm opponent. He cleared his throat loudly.

“Look,” he said, failing miserably at removing the nervousness from his voice, “if these children – if they ever _became_ children – what – I mean, would you really send a child like that to a public school? Half-Pokémon? I mean, they’d be bullied, and – they’d live perfectly miserable lives, really – that is, if they ever were to become children, which they’re not –”

“I assume, then,” Hannah said coolly, “that you are of the opinion that, say, fat children ought to be systematically murdered because they could be bullied at school? Unattractive children? Children with… glasses?”

She looked at him with stinging blue eyes and Brian fiddled uncomfortably with his own glasses, blushing. Damn it. Why did she look so creepily calm?

“It’s… it’s not the same,” he said quickly. “They can’t feel anything. They don’t ‘want’ to live. It’s…”

“They will,” Hannah said.

“That… that isn’t relevant,” he stuttered, trying to remember what Dave had been telling him to say in this kind of situation.

“Well, Hannah, why don’t you tell us your position on the matter?” said James brightly, turning towards her.

“As I see it,” she said simply, “the case is dead already. It does not even have the little that abortion normally has going for it. What do those in favor always say? ‘What about rape?’ ‘What about what the sexually liberal call “accidents”?’ ‘What about if the child turns out to be seriously handicapped and the parents wouldn’t be able to handle it?’ We don’t even need to complicate the matter with those here. This is not rape. It’s not an accident. Nothing is ‘turning out’ to be anything it wasn’t obviously to begin with. These men –” she pointed an accusing finger at Brian “– perfectly deliberately created _children_ with perfectly deliberate qualities that, yes, could cause them problems in the future, but that means they need to be helped, not murdered. And you, Mr. Edwards, need to realize that if they get bullied, it is _your_ fault; it is you that deliberately engineered them to be the way that they are.”

Brian stared at her, dumbfounded. “Why are you always calling them children?” he muttered, only half-convinced, while trying to think of something else to say; she just responded with a look of bemused superiority

He took a deep breath, thinking of what the others had been talking to him about. “Okay, look. If we didn’t destroy the fetuses, who would raise them?”

She gave him an odd look, raising an eyebrow. “You, of course,” she said. “They’re your children which you created by your own free will. I haven’t known anybody who deliberately decided to have a child and then expected someone else to raise it.” She turned towards the host, who was still wearing his plastic-looking smile and did not look like he was interested in the discussion at all. “See, amazingly, most of the scientists involved are in long-term relationships and in their twenties or thirties; some even have children already. They’re perfectly fit to raise children, if they would just snap out of wanting them killed.”

Brian stared at her, the implications of this zooming through his head. “What? Us? But… what are you talking about, anyway?” he asked heatedly. “We didn’t deliberately create _children_. We deliberately created fetuses we intended to destroy. We weren’t planning to raise…”

“Well, you should have thought about that before creating them, shouldn’t you?” Hannah remarked coldly. “Go ahead! Have unprotected sex! You’ll just tell the girl to have an abortion! Is that it?”

There was some great way to respond to this, he was sure, and Dave would have said it in the blink of an eye, but his mind was being too numb and panicky at the moment to think of anything.

“It… it seemed like a much better idea at the time,” he said stupidly. “We’d had a little to drink that night since it was Dave’s birthday – he always gets weird ideas when he’s drunk – and it was just so obvious, I mean, look at all those book series – and after getting the idea and working out how it was possible with some brainstorming, we just figured, hey, why not…” What the hell was he saying?

Hannah gave him a disgusted frown and looked at the camera. “Drunk scientists who want to imitate children’s books in some sad attempt to get attention make genetic experiments with unborn human children, and now, to top it all, they want to kill them. Witness the moral state of today’s scientific minds. I think taking on some responsibility for their actions would be very healthy for these people.”

“But…”

\-------

Damn it.

Damn it all.

Fucking hell.

Brian shivered as he started his car. In the rear-view mirror, he could see that he was pale and sweaty. And his glasses still looked so damn stupid. He had failed so miserably it wasn’t funny. The public against them once and for all in one fell swoop. Why the hell had he been mentioning that they’d been drunk?

These same thoughts cycled repeatedly through his head on the long journey home to Taillow Springs. A few times he nearly forgot to stop at a red light when his mind was lost reliving every horrible second of the show. By the time he turned into his home street, he felt like he would never trust himself to drive a car again.

His cellphone started vibrating just as he was pulling into the driveway. He slapped his hand over his face momentarily in some abstract hope that it would just stop ringing. It didn’t.

He fished the phone out of his pocket, opened it and held it shakily to his ear. “Yes?”

_“Well, now you’ve gone and done it.”_

Brian sighed heavily. “I told you, Dave. I suck at this kind of thing. You really should’ve…”

_“I had no idea you sucked that much! I persuaded Jane to agree to go home a little early from the restaurant so we could watch you on the one-hour delayed channel – I felt embarrassed for even knowing you!”_ the voice on the other end of the phone shouted angrily. There was a sigh followed by silence. _“You’ve really fucked us up, Brian.”_

“I know,” Brian said miserably. “She was just so calm and making so much that I just…”

_“Making sense?”_ the phone shouted at him. _“She was making no fucking sense whatsoever! You didn’t even say half of the stuff we talked about! And for Christ’s sake – well, not his, specifically, but you know what I mean – babbling on about how I have weird ideas when I’m drunk? What the fuck?”_

“I don’t know,” Brian replied desperately. “I just… maybe she was right. I mean, it seems kinda cruel to create them at all if… maybe we should raise them…”

_“Right? Right?”_ Dave repeated. _“Of course there’s not much at stake for you here, since you’re single and could maybe weasel out of it, but those of us with significant others – do you really expect Joe to go home to his kids and tell them, ‘Hey, guys, you’re going to have a brother and he’s a freak!’? And me, personally, I like my private time with Jane. Kids would really ruin that, especially freak kids that’ll be pissing all over the place to mark their territory or something – but there’s no way we can abort them after that went on air and continue to get funding from anywhere that cares about PR! You’ve seriously fucked us up, man. Remind me never to make you represent us again.”_

“I know,” Brian muttered, but Dave had already hung up on the other end of the line. He sighed and closed the cellphone, pushing it back into his pocket.

He stayed in the car for a few more minutes, staring at the garage door between burying his face in his hands. He had really messed things up. The others would never forgive him, ever.

Not much to do about that now.

He stepped out of the car with a sigh, wishing he could just sink into the ground, and entered his house to cook himself some instant noodles and go to bed. Maybe he’d feel less like killing himself in the morning.

The next day, Heywood Labs issued a public statement to apologize for their previous plans and promise that the scientists involved would raise the Pokémorph children themselves to the best of their ability.


End file.
